SharePoint Portal Area Permissions Issue and Fix

Todd Bleeker is my new hero! While at TechEd, he graciously spent quite some time with me fixing a permissions issue I was having with my SharePoint portal. This probably isn’t a common problem, but definitely worth putting info out there in case someone else is having the same issue. Todd made my day and I am very grateful!!!

The Issue:
I had created a custom site group in a SharePoint portal for the reader role and was not using the default SharePoint reader role. (I needed to modify the permissions and did a custom site group as opposed to tweaking the default role).

In my portal situation, security requirements were for contributors to have access to their areas, but not other areas, so using site groups for permissions was not feasible. Instead I edited the security for each area and added the users that needed contributor access. The problem that arose was any custom created list or document library was NOT available to the area contributors when they did a create content. The only lists and libraries listed were the default – nothing custom.

The FixWhat Todd did to fix my issue was check out the List Template Gallery permissions… a tricky thing to figure out on a portal since there are no list/library level permissions for portal. He went to change permissions in the list template gallery on a WSS site, copied the URL, made some tweaks and was able to pull up the permissions for the portal’s list template gallery page.

As Todd suspected, my new custom site group was not listed in the permissions for the list template gallery page. So because I had created a new site group for the portal’s reader role, the area contributors (who all belonged to that custom reader role) were unable to view items in that list template gallery. The fix was easy, we just inherited permissions from the portal and it sucked in the new custom site group and area contributors were then able to access custom lists and libraries.

The Magic URLA basic thing that this whole exercise reminded me was that you can be tricky and use WSS URLs for portals even when the options are not there through the interface. After all, underneath the covers all a portal is… is a WSS site. ?

For this particular fix, do the following to get the correct URL to edit list template gallery permissions:

In the portal, go to the list template gallery page, select Modify settings and columns.

Hmm, I see some comments on Bil’s post that people had the same login prompt as well, who were even logged in as admin on the server.

I have only used this trick to re-inherit the permissions from the parent. I just tried this myself to add a new user, I added one just fine with no login prompts, but it redirected me to the Add User screen for the portal and added the user at that level instead of at the list level. I am unsure of a resolution.